Spring
2000 (8.1)

The Institute
of ManuscriptsEarly
Alphabets in Azerbaijan

by
Dr. Farid Alakbarov

Few countries have gone
through as many alphabet changes as Azerbaijan. In the 20th century
alone, it has officially used four different scripts. Prior to
that time, especially before the Arabic script was introduced
in the 7th century, various other alphabets were used. Many examples
of these scripts - especially those beginning with medieval times
- are on display at the Institute of Manuscripts in Baku.

Dr. Farid Alakbarov, a Medical Historian, has devoted much of
his academic career to studying medical manuscripts of the Medieval
period at the Institute. In order to unlock the mysteries of
medieval health practices as documented in handwritten documents,
not only has he had to master numerous scripts as they evolved
over the centuries, but he also had to learn to decipher the
idiosyncrasies of individual handwriting styles.

Despite the fact that the Arabic script was in use between the
7th century and 1929, few young people in the Azerbaijan Republic
can read it these days, even though their grandparents grew up
learning it at school. [Note that in Iran, where an estimated
25 to 30 million Azerbaijanis live, the Arabic script is the
official state alphabet.]

_____

Early Scripts
Visiting Baku's Institute of Manuscripts and seeing their exhibits
of manuscripts in various alphabets is like taking a walk back
through time. One of the earliest alphabets in the region was
a cuneiform script, made up of wedge-shaped characters, which
were created by pressing a stylus into clay. According to ancient
Assyrian and Greek sources, this script was used in Southern
Azerbaijan (Kingdom of Manna) during the 9th century BC. Nowadays,
this region is in contemporary Iran.

Photo: Baku's Institute of
Manuscripts houses more than 3,000 volumes written in the medieval
Azeri Arabic script. It also has a rich collection of ancient
scripts used in Azerbaijan.

Next came an ancient Syrian and Aramaic (not Armenian) script
that was used by the Medeans that lived there between the 6th
and 1st centuries BC. Unfortunately, samples of these two scripts
are not available at the Institute.

But we do have books in our archives written in a variant of
the Aramaic (the so-called "Pahlavi" or "Avestian"
alphabet) that was widespread in Southern Azerbaijan, Iran and
Central Asia during the first centuries AD (before Islam came
to the region). The Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians
(the ancient religion of Azerbaijan and Iran), was written with
the Pahlavi script. Pahlavis (Partheans) were the ancient tribes
from Afghanistan and Central Asia that conquered Iran and Azerbaijan
in the 3rd century B.C. However, the Pahlavi books kept in our
Institute are editions of the Avesta that were reprinted at the
beginning of the 20th century; they're not originals.

Beginning in the 4th century AD, natives of Northern Azerbaijan
(Caucasian Albania) began using an Albanian script. While there
are no extant manuscripts in our Institute from this time period,
there are some monumental Albanian stone carvings on exhibit
at the Museum of History of Azerbaijan (Taghiyev Museum) nearby.

Old Turkic
The nomadic Turkic tribes that inhabited Azerbaijan between the
4th and 8th centuries AD used a Runic script, which is also indigenous
to some of the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, Britain,
Scandinavia and Iceland. Examples of this type of writing can
be found carved on the Garga Dashi rocks near the Nuvadi settlement.
Azerbaijanis resided in this district of Megri in contemporary
Armenia before they were ousted about ten years ago. Carvings
in the Runic script have also been found in the North Caucasus
mountains and Altay. This alphabet has been carefully studied
and documented.

Left: Runic alphabet used
by the nomadic Turkic tribes that inhabited Azerbaijan between
the 4th and 8th centuries AD.Right: Notice for Hajibeyov's
music comedy, "Arshin Mal Alan" (The Cloth Peddlar),
early 20th century.

Arabic Introduced
After the Arabs conquered the region and brought Islam in the
7th century AD, the Arabic alphabet became the standard script.
The Institute has 3,000 samples of early Arabic-script manuscripts,
dating as far back as the 9th century. The ones I've studied
the most are the 70 handwritten texts devoted to medicine, including
Tibbname (Book of Medicine), written by Muhammed Yusif Shirvani
in Azeri in 1712.

Other Arabic-script works feature poetry by writers such as Fuzuli,
Nasimi, Khatai, Saib Tabrizi and Vagif. There are also books
in the fields of astronomy, astrology (Turk Illeri) and history
(including one on the history of Karabagh, called Garabaghname).

Arabic Script Reforms
As might be expected, it soon became clear that the Arabic alphabet
was not a perfect fit for the Azeri language. For instance, medieval
Azerbaijani writers found that they had to add a new letter to
the Arabic alphabet to represent a nasal consonant sound found
in medieval Azeri. The consonant sounded similar to the "ng"
in the English word "ring". For example, the Azeri
word for sea, "Daniz", was pronounced "Dangiz".
"Alini yu!" (Wash your hands!) was pronounced "Alingi
yu!" There was no letter for this "ng" sound in
the Arabic alphabet, since it wasn't indigenous to either the
Persian or Arabic language. The new letter became known as "saghir-nun"
(little nun, "nun" being the original Arabic letter
representing the "n" sound). Strangely, this sound
was represented by adding three dots above the letter "kaf"
- "k", not above "nun".

You won't find the "saghir-nun" in manuscripts beyond
the Turkic regions. Evidence is only found in Azerbaijan and
neighboring regions. Poems by Nasimi (14th century) and Fuzuli
(16th century) both use this letter. Even though this sound gradually
disappeared from literary Azeri, the letter remained in the script
up until the beginning of the 20th century. For example, you
can find it Sabir's satire, Hop Hop Name (1922).

Azeri also differs from Arabic and Persian in its use of the
letter "ha" (the upside-down "e" in Azeri
Latin, which represents the "a" sound in "fat
cat"). In Persian and Arabic, this vowel sound is never
written in the middle of a word - only at the end. But in medieval
Azerbaijan, this letter was often used in the middle of words,
even though this would have seemed like an error to most readers
in Arabia or Persia.

Therefore, there were three forms of the Arabic script spread
throughout the region of Azerbaijan - Arabic, Persian and Turkic.
Along with "saghir-nun" and the non-traditional use
of "ha", the Azeri variant of Arabic included letters
that had been invented by medieval Persians. These included the
letters called "gafe-farse", "Zhe" (the first
sound in the name "Jala", not "j" itself),
"pe" and "chim". As a result the pure Arabic
script contained 28 letters, Persian had 32, and Azerbaijani
had 33 (all the Persian letters plus "saghir-nun").

All medieval Azeri texts were written in the slightly Arabic
script modified for Persian. Of course, it was insufficient and
inadequate and didn't meet the requirements of the Azeri language.
For example, some sounds had duplicate letters (2 letters represent
"t", 3 for "s" and 4 for "z").
And none of the short vowel sounds were represented at all (a,
i, o, u).

Mirza Fatali Akhundov (1812-1878) was one of the first Azerbaijanis
to initiate any serious thought on reforming the Arabic script
for Azeri.

Other outstanding voices in the movement of reform were Mahammadagha
Shahtakhtinski, who proposed various reforms between 1879 and
1902. Due to technical difficulties, none of these alphabets
was implemented. In 1903, Shahtakhtinski founded the newspaper
"Shargi Rus" (Russian East) primarily to discuss alphabet
reform. In 1880, Chernyayevsky wrote a book about Arabic reform.
That same year, Mirza Rida Khan Danish published a project introducing
a Latin script called "Alphabet Rusdia."

Between 1832 and 1920, at least 140 magazines and newspapers
were published in Azeri using the Arabic script. It was an amazing
number of publications for that period and illustrates how highly
the written word was esteemed.

Most of these newspapers and magazines are viewed as treasures
at the Institute of Manuscripts and various other archives in
Baku. They include the following:

Also, some magazines were published in Azeri in Tbilisi (Georgia),
such as Ziya and Akinchi. Burkhane-Hagigat was published in Yerevan
(Armenia).

The Azerbaijani magazines and newspapers that were published
in the Arabic script (1920-1929) during the early Soviet Period
were primarily devoted to various political and social problems
related to work, culture, art and education. Written from a Soviet
(Marxist-Leninist) ideological perspective, they were full of
caustic criticism against Islam and the Arabic script. The State
obviously wanted to set the stage for ridding the country of
Arabic and introducing a new script - Latin.

Southern Azerbaijan
We have quite a number of manuscripts and books in Azeri that
were published in Southern Azerbaijan (now Iran) and written
in the Arabic script. Among them are newspapers and magazines
published in Tabriz during the national movement of the 1940s
during the Soviet occupation and the government of Pishavari,
as well as later. These include: Azerbaijan (published by the
Azerbaijan Democratic Party) (1941, 1954-1955); Azad Millat (Independent
Nation) (1946) and Vatan Yolunda (In the Name of Motherland)
(1942).

Azeri Latin (1929-1939)
When Azerbaijan decided to switch to a Latin alphabet during
the early Soviet period, many of the Arabic publications changed
to the new script. The ones that continued to publish in Arabic
were used by the Soviet government to issue propaganda bitterly
criticizing Islam and the Arabic script. From the late 1920s
onwards, there was a widespread campaign to destroy all Arabic
texts, whether they related to religion, science, medicine or
literature (See AI 7.3, Autumn 1999, "The Day They Burned Our Books" by Asaf Rustamov).

A number of the periodicals published in the early Latin script
are kept at our Institute. They include: Gizil Araz (1938), Gizil
Shafag (1930), Adabiyyat Gazeti (1936), Adabiyyat Jabhasinda
(1930), Zagafgaziya Bolsheviki (1931), Zarba (1932) and Ingilab
ve Madaniyyat (1928-1933). These documents often emphasized that
the transition to the Latin alphabet played a valuable role in
the struggle against illiteracy in Azerbaijan.

Transition to Cyrillic
(1939)
The transition to Cyrillic began in 1939, when the Stalinist
repression was at its height. Apparently Stalin had not anticipated
that Turkey would also adopt Latin and wanted to discourage any
contact between Turkey and the Turkic Republics.

During the Repression, tens of thousands of citizens, not just
in Azerbaijan, but throughout the Soviet Union, were being arrested,
jailed and either executed or sent to labor camps in Siberia.
Keep in mind that the USSR was preparing itself for war against
Germany at the time as well. Turkey was an ally of Germany in
both World Wars. As a result, thousands of Azerbaijanis (who
were categorized as Turks) were interred in prison from regions
extending from the border of Turkey eastward to Central Asia.

I haven't been able to find anything about a serious struggle
against the transition to Cyrillic in Azerbaijan. Unfortunately,
nobody at our Institute is especially engaged in the study of
alphabet itself. However there are sources available at the Manuscript
Institute that include both the early and the late variations
of Cyrillic used in Azerbaijan.

The official name of our people (Azeri Turks) as well as the
alphabet (which was Latin and similar to the Turkish script)
was changed. Two years earlier in 1937, most Azeri dissidents,
as well as any bold and free-thinking individuals, had been executed
or imprisoned. The surviving population became extremely fearful.
Who would have dared to raise an objection against Stalin's decision
to impose the Cyrillic script? And if they had, who would have
dared to keep any records?
_______

Medical Historian
Farid Alakbarov has been researching ancient manuscripts
at Baku's Institute of Manuscripts since 1986. He has written
several books about his studies of ancient medical texts, including
"The Comparative Analysis of Medicinal Herbs of the Middle
Ages and Contemporary Azerbaijan" and "Treatment Methods
Used in Medieval Azerbaijan." Farid has also written a book
in Azeri Latin called "Science in Tales," which introduces
concepts like DNA, symbiosis and photosynthesis in a fairy tale
format for children.